Ed Murray/The Star-LedgerMarta Tienda is a Princeton professor who is a demograpaher and social scientist. Dressed in her signature turquoise and gold, professor Marta Tienda sits in a Princeton University classroom, a peacock among the Ivy League grad student wrens.

She is the center of attention, not because of her looks, but because of her intensity, her palpable focus and barely restrained energy; it is a case, she jokes, "of making ADD work for me."

She is one of the world’s foremost sociologists, an achievement she insists has little to do with genius and everything to do with "trying harder than everybody else."

"What I bring to the table is proof that anybody can make it if they do the work," says Tienda, 59. "I want what I am and where I came from to resonate with people, particularly young Hispanic women. I want to tell anyone who might be intimidated by a place like Princeton that, if you got in, you belong here just as much as anyone."

Tienda’s road to excellence began as a child migrant worker in the farm fields of the Midwest, where she picked vegetables alongside her three sisters, brother and her father, an illegal immigrant from Mexico.

It is a journey that involved loss, sacrifice and decades of 18-hour workdays. A skit performed at the University of Chicago, when she taught there, featured "three students simultaneously playing her in an attempt to portray how she appears to be everywhere at once," says colleague James Trussell, who succeeded Tienda as director of the Princeton University Office of Population Research.

"Perhaps the single word that most nearly captures Marta is energy," Trussell says. "I feel tired just being around her."

This is just a partial list of Tienda accomplishments: wrote or edited 10 books, some still considered benchmarks in their field; published 117 articles; obtained 16 research grants; served on 26 boards, including the Federal Reserve; edited a major journal; chaired a major department, taught 23 different courses; and directed a major population center.

She has traveled the world, presenting groundbreaking work at major conferences, testifying on behalf of immigrants’ rights and collaborating with some of the planet’s best social scientists. She still goes to school, "because I have more to learn."

Toribio Tienda was 16 when he sneaked across the Rio Grande in 1941. He worked the ragged edges of the American dream, making $1 a day picking grapefruits and oranges before he hit the big time: 45-cents an hour at a fruit packing plant in Edcouch, Texas.

There, he met a first-generation Mexican-American named Azucena Socorro. They eloped in 1946 because her parents disapproved. It was a love match with benefits: Azucena’s American citizenship allowed Toribio to legalize his status.

Marta, their second child, was born in 1950. A year later, the Tiendas moved to Michigan. By working double shifts at a steel mill and a Ford plant, Toribio saved enough money to buy a two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow in the Detroit suburbs.

In 1957, however, Marta’s mother died after botched routine surgery. Authorities threatened to take the children — now numbering five — because Toribio was gone so much at work. He remarried to protect his family. The marriage brought two more children into the tiny house and Beatrice, a stepmother who carried her own bullwhip.

"She mostly just threw things at me, but my brother and the bullwhip were another story," Tienda says, with a small, sad smile. "You know Cinderella? My stepmother made that stepmother look like the fairy godmother."

More hard times were ahead. For two summers, strikes closed the plants and the Tienda children worked the fields with their father. Their first crop-picking summer was in 1960. The oldest child, Maggie, was 12, followed by Marta, 10; Juan Luis, 9; Irene, 6, and Gloria, 5.

The older children had a quota of 40 gallons of tomatoes a day. They lived in shacks with no running water.

Marta’s refuge was school, which her father refused to let her miss. He followed his own advice after he retired. He received his high school diploma at age 74.

Beatrice eventually divorced Toribo, who died in 2005. All the Tienda children graduated high school and three of the five have advanced college degrees.

EDUCATION AND OPPORTUNITY

Tienda worked harder at school than anyone else and dreamed of becoming "a beautician, because that was the best job I could imagine. But I had a teacher who suggested I could get a college scholarship. I still remember what Mrs. Miller wore the day she changed my life."

Tienda studied Spanish literature on a full scholarship at the University of Michigan. Her plan to become a teacher was derailed by a summer job working with immigrants. Tienda discovered she could mediate change, for instance, when she convinced growers it was in their best interest to provide day care for workers. She vowed to become "a problem solver."

A Ford Foundation fellowship paid for grad school at the University of Texas, where she earned a doctorate in sociology in 1976. The same year, she married fellow grad student Wence Lanz. They met when he asked her to translate a paper. He was, she says, an entrepreneur and a bit of a dreamer.

The marriage began in tragedy: the day before the wedding, her brother, Juan Luis, a lawyer who worked with immigrants in Michigan, died in a crash while driving her car.

Grieving and broke, the couple went through with the wedding, but didn’t have enough money to buy a car to get to her new job teaching at the University of Wisconsin. A neighbor of her father’s, who had encouraged and supported Tienda during her difficult childhood, loaned her $1,000 for a new car.

"I said I would pay her back, but she told me to pay it forward and help someone else when I could," Tienda recalls. "I take that promise very seriously."

Tienda had resisted working minority projects because "I didn’t want to be labeled the Mexican-American sociologist," she says. "But after my brother’s death, I felt I owed it to him to carry on his work with Hispanics. I soon realized, this is where I could really make a difference, improve people’s lives."

For more than 20 years, Tienda has done just that, although her research has expanded to cover other minorities.

Her seminal work, "The Hispanic Population of the United States," was published in 1987 and is still used in college classrooms. Analyzing demographic patterns over a 20-year period, it was the first authoritative description of this country’s diverse Hispanic population. It led to a professorship for Tienda at the University of Chicago.

There, she helped rebuild the population studies office into a world-renowned research center and eventually became chairwoman of the sociology department. She collaborated with Israeli sociologist Haya Stier on another benchmark study — "The Color of Opportunity: Pathways to Family, Welfare and Work," published in 2001. Based on a survey of Chicago’s racially diverse, inner city poor, it documented ways in which race limited economic opportunity.

Her strengths, colleagues say, lie in the breadth of her knowledge, her grasp of the mathematics that drive quantitative demographic research and, of course, that prodigious energy.

Noted sociologist Ruben Rumbaut remembers first seeing Tienda at a conference in 1986. "There were top scholars there, and maybe 2 percent of the audience could follow the structural equations she was throwing at us at 100 miles per hour.

"It was a very powerful presentation, full of very complicated numbers and very elegant," adds Rumbaut, who married Tienda’s sister in 1992. "Marta can see patterns in data that other people miss. When you see what Marta has achieved, particularly in the context of the poverty in which she began, this is the stuff of movies."

BALANCING WORK, FAMILY

Tienda has two children, Luis, born in 1982, and Carlos, born in 1989. She got divorced in 1994. She learned to live alone. She coped by becoming, her sons say, "a super workaholic."

"My mom loved slice-and-bake cookies because they were quick. There were times when I saw more of the grad students who would take care of us than her, but she was always there when we needed her," says Luis, now 27. "When I got in trouble at school, she walked out of a conference in Switzerland to be with me."

In her cluttered Princeton office, staring at pictures of her sons, both now handsome men, Tienda admits: "It was grindingly hard. I needed to be there for my boys, but I needed my work, too. It took a toll on all of us."

A once-typical day for Tienda — a schedule started in Chicago and continued when she came to Princeton University in 1997 — started at 5 a.m. and went non-stop until midnight or 1 a.m.

She made time for the gym because "a carbohydrate-heavy poverty diet is a good recipe for lifelong weight problems" and insisted on being home to give her kids breakfast and dinner. She tried to attend all of her sons’ soccer and lacrosse games. Every other waking minute was, and still is, devoted to reading, teaching, advising, researching or writing.

Even now, after her children have left the nest and she has moved from Princeton to Lawrenceville, Tienda keeps the same basic schedule. She travels frequently, either to speak at conferences, testify at hearings or receive awards. From 1998 to 2002, she directed Princeton’s Office of Population Research. In 2002, she became president of the Population Association of America.

In 2003, she began a two-year term on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank, the National Academy of Sciences asked her to lead a two-year study on Hispanics in the United States, and Hispanic Business Magazine named her one of the Top 100 influential Hispanics in the country.

In 2005, her biography was included in the Women’s Adventures in Science series underwritten by the National Academy of Sciences. She received a lifetime achievement award from the International Institute of New Jersey.

"She is a powerful role model for refugees, and besides, one of my favorite people in the world," says institute Executive Director Catherine Tansey. "She’s this little dynamo in high heels and short skirts, who lived the immigrant experience, but insists that facts, not sentiment, inform the debate.

"I’ve met some amazing people in my time, but no one like Marta Tienda," Tansey added. "She is a force of nature and a national treasure."

Judy Peet may be reached at jpeet@starledger.com.

I wish I were: "Taller than 5-foot-2. Why do you think I love high heels?"

A woman can never have: "Too much jewelry. Just because I’m a science geek doesn’t mean I have to look like one."

My favorite vacation is: "Lying on the beach in Mexico with my sisters."